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Let’s be realistic

MHB

Politicians and journalists habitually say, condescendingly, that environmental campaigners are unrealistic in our demands. The problem is not that we are unrealistic. The problem is that we have read the science and are operating with a different understanding of what is realistic.

The response to covid has demonstrated that what is politically and economically unrealistic can change in a few weeks. Two years ago a demand for everyone to stay in their own homes for 23 hours a day was politically unthinkable; 18 months ago nearly everyone complied. In 2007 it was unthinkable that the government would give private banks support worth £1.162 trillion (£1,162,000,000,000, i.e. more than one million million); it was done by 2009. During the second world war businesses were left in private hands but subject to a degree of state direction that would have been unthinkable in 1938.

Scientific realism is not open to such adaptation. Change is happening on a geological scale, a scale that is difficult for us to comprehend. Geological speed is too slow for the human eye to detect the change so we look to the people with the tools to detect the change, the scientists. In geological time, the fifth major extinction was 66 million years ago when three quarters of plants and animals, including the dinosaurs, were driven to extinction by climate change. Then climate change was caused by an asteroid. Today we are living through the sixth major extinction, an outcome of climate change caused by us. The faster the climate changes the more difficult it is for plants, animals and ourselves to adapt.

If we want to limit and slow climate change we have to cut our green house gas emissions fast. Scientists inform us that carbon emissions need to be cut 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 to give us a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C. If all the pledges made at COP26 are met, global emissions in 2030 will be 14% higher than those in 2010. Politicians and journalists tell us that, in terms of political realism, this was a success. To be realistic in scientific terms, it was a failure.

When political and economic realism collides with scientific realism there can be only one winner. Slowly but inexorably scientific realism will grind political realism to dust. Slowly but inexorably more species die. Stewardship of the natural world is not only a moral responsibility, it is in the interest of the vast majority of people. Responsible stewardship requires substantial and rapid action. It is the only realistic response if we want to protect our beautiful world.

by Rebecca Saville

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How we can heed Covid-19 and realise a sustainable, sufficient and resilient future for all?

MHB

Steve Gwynne

For me, the central basis of a sustainable, sufficient and resilient future is to manage the gdp size of the global economy so that it remains well within the global safe operating space. This I imagine could be measured and monitored using an adapted version of the Doughnut economic model whereby GDP size is mapped on to the doughnut model.
Adapted doughnut model
As such, the pathway of a sustainable, sufficient and resilient future for All could best be charted by implementing the conclusions of The Good Life study which charts a way for humanity to live within planetary ecological boundaries.
At present, there does not exist an international based or global based strategy to create The Good Life except for the growth orientated SDG framework. As such, the only available strategy is a national based one, or to be more precise, a global system based on national communities (see Good Life study above).
As a global/national strategy, the Good Life would work mostly using a bottoms up approach whereby national communities, in relation to other national communities, would manage their own ecological IMPACT* in relation to their own national ecological capacity. This bottom up approach could be enhanced by using a more federated county national system like Germany which reduces the prevalence of overcentralising and overconnected megacities through which risks and shocks rapidly spread. A UK federated county system would also enable the decentralisation and diversity of innovation hubs to help realise a post carbon economy.
The overarching goal of #TheGoodLife is to contract our human economy and return humanity to within the global safe operating space. Particular responsibility is put on high impact nations living well beyond their ecological means. In this regard, a core economic strategy for high impact nations could be ‘levelling down’ (or to ‘level down’) which means bringing everyone into the £15-30 per hour wage rate (after tax) and thereby reducing our national GDP and our ecological impact* but at the same time utilising taxation to create robust and resilient public systems.
Levelling down would cause a lot of unemployment so in ancipation, Good Life systems would need to be developed that can sustainably support human redundancy on a potentially large scale with these alternative systems actively seeking to reduce our overall human impact*. The low impact (and low cost) solution could be achieved by utilising 1 acre smallholding systems which derive much of their survival needs mostly from the land. These smallholder systems would also utilise cottage industries using locally sourced renewable resources to create household items like brushes, baskets and brooms. This new use of land may need a new status, perhaps smallhold in contrast to leasehold or freehold and would be premised on existing allotment systems or crofting systems.
By facilitating back to the land/nature livelihoods, human industrial redundancy would be actively reducing our national impact* and increasing our national resilience, especially in food, shelter and water. Low impact smallholding lifestyles would also broaden economic diversity, so will add further to our overall national resilience.
I think that the Good Life national endeavour would need to be temporarily supported with tax paid grants to help with relocation and reskilling. This would be an investment for everybody, especially future generations, so that we can develop an adequate human knowledge base to live low impact lives. This knowledge base will inform us on how to achieve high levels of self reliance whilst enhancing wild Nature too. This means, in order to deploy industrial redundancy to best effect, smallholding systems should be integrated into nature recovery networks by providing public goods in the form of ecosystem services such as pollinator habitats, soil improvement, flood management and carbon requester practices.
Two important critiques that commonly arise regarding ‘leveling down’ and instituting 1 acre smallholding systems is that levelling down needn’t cause unemployment if remaining full time jobs became job shares so that people were working 15-20 hours instead of the 40 hour week. Regarding one acre smallholding systems, it is argued that this would most certainly devastate what little remains of other nonhuman life and their habitats and instead we should focus our attention on encouraging urbanisation and utilising synthetic foodstuffs.
In response, I argue that levelling down – and through taxation bringing everyone into a £15-30 hourly wage bracket – would cause unemployment since middle class professionals will no longer afford domestic services, care services, gardening services, trade services, etc – all of which are predominantly the domain of the working class.
Similarly, a reduced income for much of the middle class will require a complete price recalibration of mortgages, rents and utility services, which will mean a significant loss of profits and the simplification of many businesses which will cause unemployment in the managerial sector.
What jobs are left could be job-shared but this shift from full time work to part time work would result in even lower household incomes to pay the bills and raise taxation. In other words, bottom up equalisation if it included the fair distribution of jobs, would simply result in everyone levelling down into relative poverty and so would be rejected by the public imagination. Similarly, universal job sharing would dramatically reduce per capita tax revenues which would require a dramatic reduction in public service provision unless people utilised their newly created non-paid-job time to volunteer their labour and expertise to run public services at the community level. In addition, reduced tax revenues would make it difficult to support policies such as the universal basic income.
However, by implementing the policy of levelling down but at the same time retaining full time jobs and deploying industrial redundancy into land based livelihoods, tax revenues can be sustained whilst not tipping working people into poverty. Therefore, I’d argue full time jobs will need to remain largely intact with labour redundancy deployed into self-reliant land based livelihoods which would combine food growing with cottage enterprises.
Regarding the concern that smallholding systems will denude our countryside of even more wild Nature, my experience of helping to manage a city based allotment site  says differently. That is to say, wild Nature on site and in the surrounding area is prolific. This is enhanced even more when allotments use permaculture techniques like mulching which provides additional all year round food webs for birds in particular. For example, as a result of mulching on site, we are now visited twice a year by a large flock of redwings.
On, around and over our site, which is only a mile from the centre of Birmingham, we regularly have buzzards, seagulls, magpies, crows, jackdaws, jays, occasional mallard ducks and herons and recently there have been sightings of hen harriers. Owls are also in abundance, as are sparrows, blue tits, great tits, blackbirds, robins, long tailed tits, greater spotted woodpeckers, green woodpeckers, song thrushes, wood pigeons, wrens with treecreepers and gold crests also occasionally spotted.
We also have badgers, mice, rats, foxes and domestic cats on the site as well as a huge diversity of flora, insects and reptiles including newts. In other words, smallholding systems designed with wild Nature in mind, with trees, shrubs, hedges, ponds and other wild areas in association with permaculture growing practices such as mulching and growing pollinator attracting plants like comfrey (which doubles up as a fertiliser) would easily outperform the ecological desolation of industrial agricultural fields.
Therefore, in my opinion, Good Life smallholding systems would be ecological synergy in action, bringing humans closer to the land, closer to wild Nature, providing low impact and low cost modes of human survival and most importantly helping to reduce overall global human impact to that wild Nature can thrive. In addition, according to Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, under allotment-style management, all of our current fruit and vegetable consumption could be grown in the UK on just 200,000ha of land (the equivalent of 40% of the current area of gardens, and just 2% of the current area of farmland).
In order to achieve the Good Life, democratic system ls and associated public consent would decide how we wish to manage our economic gdp size in order to remain within our national safe operating space. I’d imagine it would be a democratically decided balance between national capitalism and national socialism with a view of reducing import dependancies and inshoring our international ecological impacts so we become more ecoliterate about our national consumption. This would be in association with co-creating highly circular economic activities as well encouraging more community based systems such as mutual credit, self build communities and more localised procurement systems. However manifested, the Good Life will need to incorporate ecological resource caps and taxation to help facilitate a just transition.
I think the ethics underlying The Good Life would simply need to be ‘caring’ and ‘sharing’, so these virtues would need to be a central feature of any communications strategy. The added benefit of using caring and sharing as values is that they are easily transferable to other nonhuman biological beings and systems.
Especially important so that national communities can best implement and demonstrate the values of caring and sharing, the Commons Dilemma will need to be a central consideration in national policy which can be facilitated and negotiated through neighbourhood forums, ward and constituency meetings and regional citizens assemblies in order to best achieve different consensus perspectives.
As mentioned previously, this national based strategy is at present, the only existing strategy by which humanity can live within the safe operating space of the Earth. However, what has impeded its implementation to date is designing and implementing a just transition plan. Well Covid-19 and the dramatic effects of lockdowns has just potentially provided the space for one.
By this I mean, in an ideal (caring and sharing) global ecological society, we would be passionately heeding the natural warnings of human encroachment into wild Nature and use the tragic opportunity created by Covid-19 to begin designing and sharing the potential of the Good Life.
This will obviously need to be done by co-designing and co-creating back to the land low impact smallholding systems and the policy of Levelling Down which I feel should be key policy responses regarding the lockdown exit strategy. This will obviously need to include adapting our planning and taxation laws in order to facilitate their emergence. In this respect, an important part of the narration would be to highlight how low impact smallholding systems is the only viable counterbalance to medium and high impact economic activities in order to bring Britain back to within its safe operating space.
Of course, these specific policies will be part of a much broader strategy developing and implementing sustainability, sufficiency and resilience systems. This I think will be significantly aided with the utilisation of metrics which can distinguish economic activity as low/medium/high impact*. This would occur as part of the process of identifying democratically decided essential/nonessential goods and services. These categories will be required in order to help inform how we manage and balance the size of our gdp in relation to our ecological capacity. Balancing the size of our national economy with our national ecological capacity will also require public education programmes around the need for ecological resource caps.
Ultimately, the objective of the Good Life is to build upon the national solidarity that has built up in response to Covid-19 which would hopefully maximise national participation in creating a sustainable, sufficient and resilient future for All.
In conclusion, with a sombre warning in mind, if it is an ecological fact that Covid-19 is a stark warning from wild Nature, then failure to implement this national Good Life strategy (or develop and implement an international/global strategy) will mean humanity becoming increasingly vulnerable if human expansionism continues with increasingly intelligent killer virus attacks until human Nature eventually retreats.
In this respect, the Good Life is our only hope, so either support it or create a viable international or global alternative, since by opting to continue growing and expanding the human ecosystem so that it continues breaching planetary ecological limits will simply mean  using even more ecological resources in order to prepare human systems for ongoing killer virus attacks.
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Republished pieces, Uncategorized

This Pandemic as an Opening for a Care-Full Radical Transformation

MHB

We are delighted to republish this piece, collaboratively written by roughly 40 scholars and activists affiliated with the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA), a network that aims at making feminist reasoning an integral part of degrowth.  More information about FADA in the endnote.

Collaborative Feminist Degrowth: Pandemic as an Opening for a Care-Full Radical Transformation

The crisis we face as a global community must be understood not only as a public health crisis, or as an economic crisis of the capitalist mode of production, but also, fundamentally, as a crisis of the reproduction of life. In this sense, it is a crisis of care: the work of caring for humans, non-humans, and the shared biosphere.

The pandemic is a historical rupture. It’s also an opening for reworlding––as one recent meme says, “There is no going back to normal because “normal” was the problem.” As a group of activists and scholars from the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA)1, we take this opportunity to reflect on how we can, from our diverse positions, face this moment, organize, and collectively imagine radical alternative modes of living: those with more time for community, relationship building, and care for each other as well as the non-human world.

This collaborative reflection is motivated by the following concerns: First we would like to stress that this crisis is NOT our degrowth. Secondly, we want to clarify what an intentional (feminist) degrowth project means, and why it is more necessary now than ever. Thirdly, we want to bring attention to dimensions of care and reproductive work that have been so centrally relied upon, yet so invisible and neglected, in this pandemic. Finally, we want to offer proposals for how this crisis can help us move towards care-full economies in the long term.

GDP is plummeting, resource use exploitation and pollution are declining, CO2 emissions have fallen, and in some places non-human life is able to reinhabit spaces made through diminished human activity. At a first glance, these items might read like a degrowthers’ or environmentalists’ wishlist, and yet we want to underline that the slowdown in the global economy provoked by the pandemic is NOT to be confused with feminist degrowth. On the contrary, some responses by dominant actors present worrisome and dangerous paths within surveillance, authoritarianism, and ecofascism. As the slogan proclaimed in the context of the last financial crisis: “your austerity is not our degrowth.”

Economic recessions or depressions are crises, they are not equitable to care-full social transformations, and they serve nothing to disentangle economic models from biophysical impossibilities of indefinite capitalist growth. Feminist degrowth embodies the vision of a radical transformation towards a just, sustainable, and convivial society brought about by voluntary change. Degrowth is an umbrella term for visions of doing economies otherwise, in ways which do not have growth and accumulation as their overriding aim but instead focus on care, well-being, conviviality, solidarity, provisioning economies, commons and commoning, and a concern for equality, human flourishing, and meeting basic needs as defined in context. It is rooted in collective, and democratic decision making.

Responses to the crisis in some quarters have included a much-needed re-evaluation of public collective goods and infrastructures, and an acknowledgment of government’s capacity and responsibility to provide for their citizens2, moves on which we want to build. However, we must be wary and vigilant against other visions seeking to capitalize on this moment that may mobilize inequality, authoritarianism, austerity, and repression. This includes Silicon Valley fantasies of provisioning to those who can afford it via Amazon drones, the fortification of global hyper-surveillance states, and a further deregulation of wage work which is already being implemented in many places. Many who are dropped from formal, more stable employment in the context of this crisis will not recover it afterwards, as countries pass special legislation allowing precarious contracts and short-time work in order to “save” businesses. Meanwhile, interventions to flatten the curve of contagion rely on repression including militarization of countries such as Ecuador, India, and Kenya, to enforce physical distancing in absence of a functional public health system, opening the way for recurrent human rights violations.

Our intervention therefore asks: how can we use this moment to democratically rebuild social organization of labor and care work? To reconstruct the realm of public welfare that has been so depleted by decades of neoliberalism, austerity, structural adjustment, and the privatization of education and healthcare? How can this opening lead our economies towards emancipation from the grips of the growth paradigm founded in heteropatriarchal capitalist principles? A feminist degrowth project calls for an end to the subalternization of reproduction in service to the realm of production.

We suggest here some priorities behind an intentional degrowth informed by a democratic and feminist approach that empowers all facets of society to engage, mobilize, and transform:

1. Towards a Provisioning Economy: Recognize and regenerate social and ecological reproductive capacities

As all but essential services are locked down, this crisis invites us to (re)consider the nature of the essential and the superfluous. As “productive” enterprises are shuttered, the material bases that sustain and regenerate life and that which we cannot live without are starkly emphasized. Some have termed those material bases the provisioning economy, one which provides what people actually need for their well-being and reproduction. This refocusing on basic material needs has sparked appreciation for the farmers who grow our food, to the supermarket workers who stack the shelves.

This capacity to provide is further based on the maintenance, recycling, repair, and restoration of environmental, infrastructural and social resources. These undergird social and environmental reproduction and are sometimes termed the reproductive economy––the work done to reproduce ourselves. It includes unpaid work in the home, as well the protection, regeneration and defense of the ecological capacities to reproduce life, often led by peasants, activists and Indigenous peoples who engage in care-full work and struggles to feed the soil, to keep water sources free from contamination and air unpolluted. Their reproductive and care labor has been considered free of charge and available for exploitation, while the including air, water, and soil fertility have been long considered a “free gift” to capitalism.

Focusing on provisioning and the reproductive economy brings economics back to its core. The word economics comes from the Greek oikonomia, which means administration of the household. A feminist degrowth calls for restructuring our economy to shift the emphasis from the production of things to feed the growth imperative and endless desires, and towards the reproduction and provisioning of life and meeting needs. It is crucial to foster this provisioning set-up of economic practice––without romanticizing ideas of the ‘local’ or forgetting gendered impacts of any economic transformation.

The sustainability of life should constitute the main goal of social organization. This requires the recognition, regeneration and strengthening of social and ecological reproductive capacities as well as a transformation of markets and modes of exchange as modes of provisioning.

Therefore, we urgently call for a society that not only stays within planetary boundaries, but replenishes and boosts both social and ecological reproductive capacities. One example are food systems based on small peasant agriculture or community supported organic agriculture which both increase local resilience, support the regeneration of the soil and reduce dependence on global supply chains.

2. Home as a site of production and reproduction

“I stay at home because I care for the vulnerable” is a common phrase we hear to promote physical distancing (problematically called social distancing) in this uniquely uncertain time. Unpacking this call for retreat into the domestic sphere as an act of caring brings up multiple questions. Who gets to stay home safely? Who are the vulnerable? And how can we care for others beyond isolation?

Firstly, we should note that the home as refuge is made luxury under existing capitalist social organization. The wealthy are those who have the luxury to shelter in place and maintain their salaries, the disadvantaged less so. In some cases, their work cannot be done from home. Some have to go out to care for others. Others don’t have a home at all. The virus, like pollution, is not democratic. It discriminates across structural inequalities, modulated by forms of oppression and discrimination which cumulate and interlock across gender, race, class, (dis)ability, age, and place, among others. Men are dying in higher numbers due to Covid-19 across all locations. In the US, black communities are more impacted, to give only some examples.

Further, the home is not always a safe space. Measures to restrict movement confine vulnerable people to the same space with their abusers leading to increasing levels of domestic violence against mainly women and children. As employers expect people to do care work and wage work at the same time, either in home offices, in their factories or on their fields, while replacing teachers at home, without due attention, gendered divisions of labor become ever more defined and unequal. This collision of wage work and care work in the home has starkly revealed what feminist scholars have always pointed out: that the household has always been a work-place and that the workplace depends on the household whether or not they are the same place or different places.

Finally, we must ask how we can center care for each other and our communities and social solidarity while maintaining physical distance. How can the conviviality and solidarity integral to degrowth thrive over alienation in these moments? While the state assumes that all households are made up of hetero-patriarchal families, and these will serve as safety nets to absorb the social and economic dislocations of this crisis; the reality is that in many countries, the most common household type is a single person.

This atomization means that forms of practical solidarity and, in fact, social proximity are needed. All over the world, communities are building support and care networks that reach beyond the heteropatriarchal nuclear family, and that support and interconnect members of non-nuclear family households, which make up the majority in every country. We share the enthusiasm of anarchist thinkers for affinity groups as one model for recreating networks of “odd-kin” rather than “god-kin” (in Haraway’s words) for surviving the virus. They suggest that by choosing a group of people you trust and with whom you share similar risk factors and levels of risk tolerance, we can joyously engage in togetherness and care now to preserve our mental and physical health. Such affinity groups can then be connected in broader groups of mutual aid which can engage in broader practical solidarity with the homeless, migrants and refugees, and collective mobilization and support for each other’s struggles and resistance––from rent strikes and labor movements to direct solidarity with care workers, LGBTIQA+ and prisoners´ rights groups.

Creating these networks of care now, beyond our homes, can overcome alienation and provide fertile ground for the necessary collective mobilization to create the futures we want in this historic moment. Further it can help us imagine more collective ways to organize the reproduction of their lives, while relying on commoning, community resources and attending community needs.

3. Towards a Caring Economy. Care Labor and Care Income

In most countries today, the majority of nurses, health aids, and child-care workers are women, while essential positions where men are concentrated include hospital orderlies, garbage collectors, agricultural laborers, doctors, delivery-people, and others. Many of these essential positions are occupied by informalized, undocumented, or migrant workers. As such, these workers face specific difficulties accessing public health and welfare services. If they fall sick they likely will still have to continue to work. So they also face greater risk of being fired or criminalized, as in many cases they will be forced to choose between hunger and health.

We consider degrowth a question of regeneration. While many aspects of our global economy need to degrow, some critical democratic infrastructures, such as infrastructures of care, will have to flourish. Therefore, we need to invest in transformative policies that center around the (re)production of life and the commoning of care. In a feminist degrowth future, the provision of community, domestic, and environmental care beyond the market and the state will be based on radically different logics than profit maximization, competition, or efficiency. We therefore also call for the socialization of all universal health care, the socialization of utilities, the decommodification of food, housing, medicines, education, and other basic services.

This pandemic has raised the pitch of calls for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), by actors ranging from Pope Francis to the Spanish Parliament and US tech venture capitalist Andrew Yang. Defined as a modest sum paid monthly to each resident to secure conditions of life, the UBI has been advocated as part of wide-ranging visions and purposes. Degrowth aligns with those proposals that seek material conditions that can liberate individuals from exploitative employment, support transformation away from environmentally-damaging regimes, and help move beyond battles of jobs vs. environment toward politics that address viable livelihoods as inseparable from a sustainable earth.

As feminist advocates of degrowth, we propose a Universal Care Income that builds on and differs from other proposals by foregrounding the social recognition of unpaid and gendered care work that we all perform to sustain the life and wellbeing of households and communities. Care income seeks to foster equity and solidarity by conceptualizing this income as an investment out of common wealth in capacities for all citizens to take care of ourselves, our kin, and others. For example, we support the call for a care income by the Global Women’s Strike (GWS) and Women of Color GWS, which urges governments to recognize the indispensable role of (re)productive work of life and survival, that we now depend on even more than ever.

4. Towards a Solidarity Economy

In the immediacy of the pandemic, we need to strengthen existing affinity groups, mutual aid networks, and all related efforts. We acknowledge that solidarity comes in many forms. Therefore, we need to support each other’s struggles and resistance––from rent strikes and labor movements, to direct mutual aid solidarity with precarious care workers, unhoused persons, and prisoners. In recognition of the enduring coloniality of North-South relations, a global foreign debt relief for states in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

We need long-term structural solutions to protect those who are vulnerable. We need shelters, sanctuaries and direct support for refugees, undocumented people, and the homeless. We also need the decarceration of immigrant detention centers and prisons, as a proven proliferation ground for community spread magnified by systemic human rights abuses, and as a further claim for a united effort for care-full transformation. Care-based crises can’t be solved by mass incarceration, or the closure of national borders. Degrowth is about planetary thresholds, not borders. The pandemic shows us that life (and its backside, death) does not recognize borders, but it does hinge on limits, for example, as deforestation from agro-industry incurs into forestlands and viruses jump from displaced wildlife to livestock and then to humans.

For now, world leaders are focusing on saving the economy. They need to focus instead on saving the biosphere, by way of swift policies like a solidarity-based Global Green New Deal. We don’t need to choose between jobs or climate protection, nor do we want to return back to ‘normal’ life or business as usual. The pandemic reveals that climate policy will require a much wiser, better-organized approach than ‘normal’. Given the global climate thresholds we have already unleashed, this concerns everybody’s survival although vulnerabilities vary strongly: while the resulting crises are distant and punctual for the privileged, their effects are disproportionate on the most vulnerable.

The pandemic offers an unprecedented, vital insight: the true, total interdependence of all humans on the biosphere. It reveals the interdependent and systemic way in which we must transform economies in the face of the growing climate and environmental emergencies to foreground care for humans and the environment. We need an economics based first and foremost in care, stewardship, cooperation, sharing, and commoning. For industrialized societies, this means vast resource and wealth redistribution, sweeping protection of ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as degrowth, and decarbonization of the economy. This must include social and environmental justice that make up for centuries of coloniality and plunder.

Change needs to be systemic to match the scale of the emergency and the inequalities uncovered and reproduced by the pandemic. This crisis can and should be used as a collective learning point for a transformation towards an alternative feminist degrowth future.
We demand a more care-full world!

Footnotes

1. Launched in September 2016 at the 5th International Degrowth Conference in Budapest. We are an inclusive network of academics and activists that aims to foster a dialogue among feminists and degrowth proponents, and to make feminist reasoning an integral part of degrowth activism and scholarship.
2. Ireland’s nationalizing of its health system is one such example.

Author: This piece is collaboratively written by roughly 40 scholars and activists affiliated with the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA), a network that aims at making feminist reasoning an integral part of degrowth. You can subscribe by sending an email to fada-subscribe@lists.riseup.net. Also, you can visit our FaDA project space on degrowth.info, follow us on twitter, or write to the coordination group at fada-feminismsanddegrowth@riseup.net.

Participants in conversations leading to this text include among others Amanda Mercedes Gigler, Anna Saave, Barbara Muraca, Corinna Dengler, Dominique Just, Eeva Houtbeckers, Emily Rose McDonald, Evi Curu, Federico Demaria, Giacomo D’Alisa, Janina Dannenberg, Jennifer Wells, Leah Temper, Lina Hansen, Lindsay Barbieri, Manuela Zechner, Maria Consuelo Revilla Nebreda, Marisol Bock, Megan Egler, Miriam Lang, Natalia Avlona, Patricia Susial Martín, Rebecca Rutt, Sophie Sanniti, Sourayan Mookerjea, Stefania Barca, Susan Paulson, Teal George, Wojtek Mejor.

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Summary of responses to the degrowthUK survey

Joe Herbert

Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond to the survey. The thoughts that we gathered here will be extremely helpful as a base from which to decide about the future directions of our emerging network! I wanted to take a moment to summarise some of the main responses to the survey, so that we can continue to collectively decide on next steps. So here we go…

  •  31 people responded to the survey. We had a fantastic geographical spread of respondents. Manchester was home to the most, with 5 respondents.
  • Most respondents work in academia at this point, though not all. PhD students were the most common, which reflects nicely the emerging interest in degrowth amongst a generation of young researchers 
  • Almost all respondents indicated their desire for face-to-face degrowthUK events, in addition to online networking and disseminating of information. This suggests we should make organising some face to face events one of our next priorities as a network
  • The overwhelming majority were happy with the email list as a method of communication. This now has 70 subscribers, which is great. Most people are already following the twitter account (@degrowthUK) and we now have a basic website installed (degrowthuk.org). Tech-savvy volunteers who can jazz up the website a bit are encouraged to step forward! There wasn’t a huge or clear appetite for any further channels of communication on top of these.
  • Thank you to about a third of you who expressed interest in hosting a face-to-face event. We will get in touch with those specific people as we look to move these plans forward. Hopefully regions are organising their own more localised activities, but it seems there is appetite for a larger national get-together. The US degrowth network has just had their first gathering, and it would be nice if we could plan something similar!

If anyone wants to follow any of this up, or has further ideas for organising a get-together, feel free to get in touch.

Convivial regards,

Joe